I first played Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal in 2020. As much as I wanted to compare them, my opinions were tainted by playing them on different difficulties because Doom Eternal wasn't challenging enough at first, but then refusing to lower it once it became a bit too difficult and frustrating.
Anyway, now in 2022 I've played both on normal and hard. But, I replayed them in French, so my opinion on the story is mostly from what I remember from two years ago.
Gameplay
Doom 2016
Doom 2016 is a good game. It's fast paced and skilful and it feels great to move around in. Supposedly many people got bored of it towards the end and didn't complete it. Arguably it *is* repetitive towards the end, but the gameplay is fun and the runtime fairly short, so I can't relate to not wanting to finish it.
I don't really know what more to say than it's yet another boomer shooter. It's got varied weapons and enemies, fast movement, and a satisfying test of your mastery over the mechanics, your precision, and fast-paced decision making — all good stuff.
The main innovation is the glory-kill. It's like catching a Pokémon in that you don't always want to use the most lethal shots. You have to be strategic and play in a way that seems less optimal and more risky to get a big health reward. I like the experience of tapping the shoot button carefully, trying to just tip a demon over into the glory-killable state. This mechanic shines more and more as the game goes on; it's always exciting and relieving to see a big enemy that has been causing you trouble flash blue, requiring you to run at it quickly before it becomes mobile again, especially when it becoming stunned takes you by surprise.
One of my favourite features on my first playthrough was the upgrade that gives you a speed boost after a glory kill. I often had clutch moments where I was surrounded by enemies and quickly setting up a glory kill gave me the chance I needed to escape. In fact I thought that this ability was pretty much essential, but on my second playthrough by chance I never found the ability, and fortunately I didn't need it to get by despite being on hard. Maybe a first time player missing this ability would have a tough time. When I replayed it on hard, I suppose I knew what I was doing and had played many more shooters by that time.
It's hard to really say anything about Doom 2016 without something to compare it to because it just does so many things very well. So...
Doom Eternal
It's a fun game. They made a couple of changes to the formula and understandably so:
- The dash gives you more and faster movement options. Moving fast is fun.
- The limited ammo gives you more reason to switch weapons. Weapon switching is fun.
And I think it's a good thing that they changed the core mechanics up to make the game feel different.
BUT
There are a number of reasons why I ultimately prefer the feel of playing Doom 2016 despite these seeming upgrades.
Movement
The double dash in practice, while meant to be used for dodging enemies and hunting them down, can also be used for running away. I think it's more fun to hurriedly find a way out of a tight spot by doing a quick glory kill on whatever happens to be near you, than always be able to instantly run to find something weak and passive to glory kill instead. When the difficulty is too high for you, you'll be doing this a lot, but even when it's not too high, there's nothing to stop you from dealing with your problems in this more cowardly less fun way. Weirdly, the speed-boost after glory-kill ability, while impossible to miss out on (a welcome change), feels way too fast. I find it far too difficult to aim effectively while moving that speed and opted not to use it on my latest playthrough.
Enemy Behaviour
The dash causes another problem: The behaviour of the enemies matters a lot less when their movements are trivially made redundant by your superior speed. The enemies often blend together in arenas. It doesn't really matter how they move or how their projectiles work because you can always get away.
One major factor in your choice of weapon is the distance of the target from you; that alone is a reason to weapon switch that is less present in Eternal. This is precisely why the Super Shot Gun is not the answer to everything in Doom 2016 — despite what people say.
Doom 2016 isn't light on the number of enemy types, but more would have been appreciated. Eternal has more on paper, but I'm not convinced it feels like more variety for these reasons.
Telling You How to Play
Having a pop-up tell you how to fight an enemy should be an instant red flag. It should either be obvious or fun to figure out what to do.
I skipped the pop-up for the Doom Hunter, on the principle I don't want to be told what to do, only to be super confused how to fight it.
Swamping
I found myself getting swamped by enemies far more in Doom Eternal, even on normal, to the point where towards the end of the game I would regularly see walls of them. I imagine this is caused by the AI needing to be more aggressive to accommodate for your increased speed. It's just not interesting to be faced with several of every enemy type at once because your options are run or BFG, compared to being faced with a small handful of enemies that you can't run away from and need to dispatch efficiently.
One-Ups
The one-ups were probably put in the game because it's relatively harder than Doom 2016. However, at any time I was walking around with over 10 one ups and that allows me to get away with being extremely sloppy, on top of the sloppiness afforded by just hitting the flame belch and all your other abilities when surrounded with nowhere to run.
Glory Kill Distance
I don't prefer the long distance at which you can initiate a glory-kill and chainsaw in Doom Eternal. It feels like you're teleporting and it seems to trivialise movement and lets you get away with being sloppy about finding targets because it's so forgiving. It's probably this way to keep your momentum going and so you're unlikely to dash towards something slightly too far away and then feel bad about it.
Chainsaw
I don't like how often I have to use the chainsaw. I think running out of ammo in shooters makes the game more interesting in the moment because you can't always rely on the best tool or your most commonly used tool for a situation. But in Doom 2016 when you run out, you can't easily get it back; you're stuck with what you find in the arena and you have limited uses of the chainsaw. In Eternal, the chainsaw recharges on its own very quickly, so it's pretty much always available to refill all of your ammo types, so it doesn't really achieve what I think they wanted the low max ammo to achieve. That said, perhaps Doom 2016 would benefit from lower ammo totals. I can imagine further iterations on the design that give you reliable ways to refill individual ammo types.
Another thing I liked about the chainsaw in 2016 was that it's a reliable tool for quickly killing individual large demons, giving it multiple utilities, but admittedly this wasn't common for me. I would have liked big enemies to be chainsaw-able in Eternal, but the designers might have felt that that would diminish The Crucible as a weapon. The Prowlers look small enough to be chainsawable in 1 charge and are similar in appearance to the basic demons; I was tricked many times by this.
In unimportant news: I preferred the mono-coloured shower of ammo in 2016 over the rainbow you get in Eternal.
Levels
The first few levels of Doom Eternal feel really long especially considering how simple your moveset is at that point. There's quite a juxtaposition between how urgently it feels you need to act to save Earth and how the early levels are a bit long and sluggish.
Challenge Objectives
There's a stark difference in the quality of the challenge objectives. Doom Eternal's are simply disappointing compared to Doom 2016's which are far more interesting and fun.
In 2016 they compel you to play the game more stylishly by asking you to:
- do specific glory-kills or enough different glory-kills. Either way, this challenges you to manoeuvre yourself into unusual positions before pressing the glory-kill button, instead of pressing it immediately like normal.
- kill specific enemies with specific weapons that you wouldn't normally use.
- kill multiple enemies in one go.
All of these are fun to pull off.
Doom Eternal occasionally asks you to do these sorts of things but it's mostly concerned with getting you to find secrets or hit enemy weakpoints in the normal way. It's as if the developers were too concerned that you might not do the fun things they made for you that they put in less fun things to do.
The hidden challenge runes in 2016, while not all interesting, gave you specific feats to accomplish within a narrow time limit. The equivalent in Doom Eternal (the hidden Gore Nests and the Empyrean Keys) just want you to kill enemies the normal way. The hidden Gore Nests give you a time limit, which I appreciate, but I miss the greater variety in 2016.
Weapon Mastery
I didn't really try to complete Weapon Mastery challenges when playing through Doom 2016 again because I was having a good time and didn't feel like I needed help, but I remember happily trying to complete them the first time through.
When replaying Doom Eternal, I was surprised by how difficult these were to complete. Not because they were hard necessarily but because of how many times you had to do something to complete the challenge and how long that would take. Consequently I only managed one of them.
When you compare the Weapon Mastery challenges [x] [x], you see the number of times you have to do something is smaller in Doom 2016. Possibly that's just because the runtime is shorter, but I think it's a problem that this sort of challenge takes so long to complete because the player needs to spend so much time going out of their way to play sub-optimally instead of properly.
For example in Doom Eternal: "Destroy 25 Arachnotron turrets with sticky bombs.". The sticky bombs are not the best tool for this because they aren't as easy to aim as the Precision Bolt or the Ballista, and that matters because those turrets need to be dealt with quickly. I'm sure to complete this, you would have to fight every Arachnotron across multiple levels this way. Comparable challenges in Doom 2016 ask you to sticky bomb 20 Imps (a very common low-threat enemy) or headshot 5 Hell Knights (a difficult shot on a specific enemy type, but a smaller number) or kill 30 stunned demons (large number but can be done on any demon type).
It's no wonder then that Doom Eternal has Mastery Tokens, items which allow you to avoid doing a challenge to get a reward — a huge red flag. There's 7 tokens available across the game and 13 Mastery challenges. I'm confused by the decisions made here. It's possible that in playtesting, nobody was completing enough of them, but lowering the requirements would have been better.
Bosses
The small handful of bosses in Doom 2016 are all great fights. They tested your skill with the Doomslayer's movement abilities. The bosses are all very large, powerful, and intimidating — exactly the sort of foes you ought to fight in a game where you play as a demon slayer. They add variety to the game by having unique attacks and behaviours, and by demanding your full attention on one demon instead of the usual arena fight against a group.
In Doom Eternal, only one boss resembles this description: The Gladiator, but I don't think he's as fun as any in Doom 2016, particularly because of the simon-says style prescriptive gameplay — an anti-feature that we will see twice more before this article ends. There's one way to play, and you are told what to do, and you have to wait around until you're allowed to do that thing. I'm sure there are great boss fights in games with some of these traits... but not all these traits.
The other four bosses are: The Doom Hunter and The Marauder who are just difficult regular enemies, and The Khan Maykr and The Icon of Sin who stand off-screen requiring you to shoot up in the air, looking away from the arena full of demons trying to kill you. I like none of this. It's ok for games to bring back bosses as regular enemies, but it's wasted opportunity to have unique encounters. The Doom Hunter, after all its build-up, is made far less special by its continual returning.
You can see how the need for the Doom Hunter to be a regular enemy limits what it can really do; you need to be able to dodge its projectiles without looking at it. The fight takes place in an arena with other enemies to think about.
I've already written a fair bit about The Marauder and prescriptive game design in another blog post, so I won't repeat it here. The gist of my problem is that The Marauder is repetitive. It asks you to play differently, but you play in that same different way over and over again. It's not fun to wait around until you're allowed to do the one acceptable move. They've patched out unintended alternative ways of killing him quicker. He takes too long to kill as a regular enemy. And he's immune to the BFG and The Crucible, so you don't really have options when you fight him.
The Khan Maykr and The Icon of Sin can barely do anything interesting in combat with you because they can't expect to have your attention at any one time. How can fighting them be engaging, if you spend half your time not engaging with them and instead doing an arena fight. This renders them not very intimidating or interesting.
Weapons
Doom 2016 didn't have enemies with specific weakpoints except for the Pinkies. But it's true that different weapons are better against different enemies. This is normal in good shooters. The relative utility of each gun against each enemy depends on subtle aspects of the enemy shape, size, speed, and movement compared to the gun spread, damage, and fire-rate. For example: micro-missiles are good against groups of small enemies; remote detonating rockets are good against enemies that move around a lot. More of this, more deliberately designed would be a good thing.
To be honest I like shooting Mancubus arms a lot, but I find it a complete chore shooting Cacodemons with sticky bombs. It's the only reliable way to quickly dispatch them until you get the Ballista's Arbalest mode, which weirdly is slow to charge in a game so fast-paced that tells you to not stop moving, but I guess it's pleasing to not have to boringly use the sticky bombs again and kill the Cacodemon in one hit. It's a shame that for so much of the game you can't really use the full auto shotgun — a really fun weapon — because of the time it takes to switch mods when you will inevitably need the sticky bombs any moment now.
I said weapon switching is fun, but not if it's prescribed that you switch to the same weapon every time you see a certain enemy. That's not more variety; it's less. To be honest it's not too bad over all. It got better for me as the game went on because luckily I like the Ballista a lot and found it more fun for destroying weakpoints than the Sticky Bombs or Precision Bolt, also you get stronger weapons over time meaning I didn't always feel the need to shoot Revenant turrets.
The design of the Plasma Rifle is good in these games. The Heat Blast and Stun Bomb in 2016 are both really great abilities that make you want to use a weapon which is kind of awkward to aim. It also makes fun noises, but I'm not sure that would be enough to get it used. I wish the Ballista worked the same way. Rather than standing still to charge it, the mods could have charged up by dealing damage with the weapon.
The Microwave Beam is another mod that requires you to pretty much stop moving to use it. It's an odd choice for Eternal. It trivialises a 1v1 fight and is awkward to use effectively against a group. I guess it's there to quickly explode a smaller enemy to do splash damage.
The Crucible
It takes too long to switch to it imo. It's a small complaint, but I need to be able to use it suddenly and put it away asap; it just takes a tad too long to come out.
...
I'm done with the negatives.
Buff Totem and the Archvile
The Buff Totem is a cool idea that plays well with the increased movement speed. It gives you a good reason to have a run-away button; you're trying to get across the arena without attracting too much fire from enemies. It's tense and fun to weave around them as your search for the totem. The Archvile is similar in this way, but he's really hard in that he takes a lot of hits to down, while standing in place, while the enemies he spawned come towards you, and then at the most inconvenient time he disappears to somewhere else. He's hard, but I don't dislike his inclusion as an occasional foe.
Maykr Drones
I like the Maykr drones. They were satisfying to headshot and a fun alternative to chainsawing things after so many hours of chainsawing. I love the pop sound when you kill any enemy with a shot in the head.
Level Design
Doom Eternal maybe has somewhat better level design, and some more variety in the appearance of areas, although I don't think the greater similarity between areas in 2016 was a problem. I found myself getting confused or lost in Doom 2016 a few times, but not so in Eternal.
Collectibles
I much prefer the little chibi toys and vinyl records you can collect over the different coloured Slayer toys in 2016. It's far more fun to find them even though they're functionally useless. Being able to fast travel towards the end of the level is a great feature only enjoyed in Eternal, however it was very easy for me to not notice the message appearing on screen to say so.
The fact that the map tells you where the secrets are is kind of crazy, but I actually think it works. Most of the time you aren't looking at the map, so when you spot secrets, it feels good, but you can never truly miss out on upgrades if you feel you need them. Sometimes you'll see a secret but not understand how to get to it. Rather than spending ages searching for it in a fast-paced action game, you can see the correct path pretty much on the map.
Gameplay Summary
Both games are good. Doom 2016's "push-forward combat" works and it challenges you to play in fun and interesting ways with its extra challenges. Doom Eternal attempts to make the player play in more fun ways but its success is mixed.
Which one should you play first? Regardless of your tastes, since Doom 2016 is simpler, it's the one you ought to start with. Consider whether to get Doom Eternal afterwards.
If I were to play one of them again, I would wait a while so that Doom 2016, with its simpler gameplay feels fresh again, otherwise it will probably feel like a downgrade from what I'm used to.
Story
Doom 2016
Doom 2016 has a very simple and straightforward story with an interesting setting and a small handful of interesting characters.
I can't get over how much I love Samuel Hayden in this game. Whereas Olivia is motivated by gaining power for herself at the expense of others, Dr. Hayden is motivated by a sense of justice and while ultimately his goal is to play with fire by using Hell as an energy source, which the Doomslayer is clearly not happy about. Your goal as the Doomslayer happens to be closely aligned with Dr. Hayden's: stopping Olivia. You are never truly on the same side yet you are reliant on each other.
Despite Hayden relying on you for the entire game, he still tricks you at the end, getting you to bring him the tool he needs to restart his dangerous plans all over again and then trapping you in Hell. It's not something I saw coming, and cements Hayden as so memorable.
The only other character really is Vega, who I guess is just a talking robot voice, but it felt sad to switch him off.
The level-to-level story of Doom 2016 is compelling. Everything you need to do has a sense of weight and urgency; you are finding problems and immediately going about solving them. Yes the whole thing is an excuse to put you in rooms with demons to shoot, but it works. The storytelling is light-weight in its involvement but it delivers great impetus to move forward.
The codecs weren't required to understand the story, it just enriched the world and added detail to the characters and environments.
Doom Eternal
The game opens with Hell on Earth, a problem with huge weight and urgency. The feeling I got seeing Earth turned red and with pentagrams slapped on it quickly dissipated, when it turned out that the actual task Doomslayer needed to do was find and kill a handful of NPCs in cutscenes, with no real sequence of events taking you from one place to the next. It gives saving Earth the feel of a fetch quest — dissonance between the ludo and the narrative. The excuses to put you in a room with demons to shoot are nowhere as good. Killing the Hell Priests, who you never see do anything, in a cutscene doesn't compare to the joy and catharsis you get in 2016 when you press 'E' to smash a device that is in part responsible for the demon invasion.
The codecs contain a lot of information required to understand the people and the places you go to, their significance, and their relationships to each other. When I sit down to play an action game, I don't want to be stopping to read all the time. The level "Sentinel Prime" is mostly codecs.
On my first playthrough I read very few of these. I remember vaguely one part of the Sentinels's history. This time I read (in French) another part. While writing this I started playing The Ancient Gods DLC, and interestingly if I hadn't these, I would not have known that the Maykrs themselves have their own god, called The Father, who is relevant in the DLC story.
These codecs actually contained some interesting stuff, but there are tons more about the Sentinels and the Maykrs which I haven't and won't read. Part of what puts me off is that they are so long. It would have been good to have more environmental story telling. If each of the codecs in the "Sentinel Prime" level had been put in front of a mural depicting the key information, it would have been better.
Ultimately, all the really cool parts of the story are told to you in text rather than shown. Perhaps this is caused by writing the world first and trying to fit a video game story into it? And yes, I will make the same criticism of Elden Ring; in terms of story, Doom 2016 is to Dark Souls what Doom Eternal is to Elden Ring. Lore is fine, but I much prefer story, and in fact no amount of lore can make up for a lackluster story.
My favourite part, though, is when Doomguy grabs Samuel Hayden and throws him through a portal after you learn he's seen as a hero by humanity, showing Doomguy's rightful contempt. And my other favourite part is Samuel Hayden noting "the very power source you sought to eradicate from Earth is now what will help you save it". I don't think there's as much dialog expressing conflict between Samuel Hayden and Doomguy this time though.
DLC
DLC Gameplay
I wrote the majority of this before playing the DLC, so the fact that I complained that I didn't get to use the Full-Auto Shotgun enough and then they put an enemy in The Ancient Gods Part 2 that can only be damaged by it, is an amazing coincidence, and I'm glad that somebody at Id had that idea.
Part 1 was fairly light on new enemies, but part 2 pleased me a lot with the increased variety and more interesting behaviours. I have the option whether to parry the Armoured Baron or destroy the armour with the Plasma Rifle. The Stone Imps have really cool fast movement, and I love chasing down the green Prowler when cursed. I even like the soldiers with the yellow shields, and no I don't find the Blood Maykr's annoying.
Doesn't this sound in contradiction to what I've said about the Marauder and the Cacodemon? The main difference is that these new enemies require way less waiting for an opportunity; they don't take ages to kill; when there is one solution to them, it's a fun solution; and they are not annoyingly frequent.
The screamer demons are quite hard to trigger at the right time — I find. I'm not that big a fan of the ghost demons; they're just a bit of a pain; you get punished for killing them too soon; and I often find myself without enough ammo to kill the ghost itself.
The big hammer weapon should have been what The Crucible is in the base game. It's such a great idea. Not only does it stun enemies, making it easier to deal with big groups, but they also drop ammo when killed while stunned, giving an alternative source of ammo to the chainsaw, and they help you kill The Marauders quicker.
I enjoyed part 2 a lot; if you were going to buy only one of them, you'd buy this one.
The final boss of 2 however is complete dog shit. It's so much of what I've been complaining about rolled into one. It's just the same Maraudery/Gladiatory gimmick over and over again for the whole fight — no other option to damage it. You get swamped towards the end by summoned demons who distract you from looking at the boss. And when you exploit the boss's weakpoint and stun it with the hammer, you do the most damage by standing still to use the Mobile Turret. As time goes on, more stuff is thrown at you, while you exploit the same weakness. It doesn't get better as the fight continues; it gets more the same.
DLC Story
The story gets even more crazy. Further heavy lore and confusion.
Samuel Hayden was some alien all along...? This undermines all his talk in 2016 about being motivated by helping mankind. It also doesn't make sense that he would be so trusting of the Doomslayer to do his bidding especially about the Life Sphere of The Father. I quote from the end of Doom 2016: "I've watched you work; come to understand your motivation. You think the only way is to kill them all - leave nothing behind"; this motivation is why he ignored Samuel's instructions. His lovably evil calm control of every situation is absent. He should have known that the Doomslayer isn't going to put too much faith in him after everything that happened between them.
I don't know what to say; the writers really managed to churn out a lot of epic sounding nonsense.
Conclusion
Doom 2016: really good /10
Doom Eternal: more good but worse /10
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